Allow me to waste your time.

This article summaries a live webcast where Oracle president Charles Philips reiterated their commitment to Java technologies following the Sun acquisition. One item of note was that they would continue to support NetBeans as a “lightweight” IDE.

Netbeans will continue as the “lightweight IDE for Java developers” and will have an increased focus on mobile development and dynamic languages. NetBeans has made some huge progress in the last 2 years under Sun’s watch, and I’m sure that it will continue with Oracle funding and steering it.

Today Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. So you can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.

Some days you learn something new and useful. This is one of them. I had to enter a 2⁷ in a post (not this one). It turns out you can bring up a handy palette of these things. Press command+option+T to make the character palette window appear. After that, its mostly drag and drop. Who knew?

Many Mac OS X applications support Unicode, a single, world-wide character set that works with most of the world’s languages. The advantages of using Unicode include easy interchange of data with users of other operating systems, and not needing to know which font to use to display text in other languages correctly.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn

Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You’ll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don’t convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year.

Whoa. Though Java didn’t beat C in this naive implemenation, it’s close enough. So, the myth about Java catching up with C does seem valid for long running programs which happen to hit some particular code repeatedly. What’s more interesting is Java does beat C if the optimizations aren’t turned on.

The idea is that Pioneer will be selling an in-dash unit that will remote to your iPhone which is still where Pandora runs. But the controls and the music will be routed to your car. The cost is $1200, but there is no service fee (beyond what you pay for your iPhone, of course). Satellite radio can’t catch a break, can it?

Says Pandora CTO Tom Conrad, “Pandora still runs on your iPhone and controls access to the service, but all control and display elements [will be] shifted to the dash. This allows you to tune into your stations, play songs, give thumbs up/down, as well as get information (including album art) about the currently playing song, all with your iPhone safely tucked away in the glove compartment.”